New Button Makes it Easier For Users to Share Real URLs From AMP Pages

February 7, 2017

Google announced that they are making it easier for users to easily view, copy, and share publisher URLs from Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) with a new “anchor button”. Many marketers have complained over the past year that when they are reading an AMP page, and they want to share the article, it is difficult to share out the publisher’s URL from their mobile device.

With the way AMP works, there are three different URLs:

– Original URL (The publisher’s document in AMP format) – http://www.example.com/amp/doc.html

– AMP Cache URL (The document served through an AMP Cache) – https://www-example-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/www.example.com/amp/doc.html

– Google AMP Viewer URL (The document displayed in an AMP viewer) – https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp.doc.html

If you would like to read more about why these different URLs exist, Google has explains reasons why in their blog post.

AMP Changes

Google has heard our complaints and made some changes for users to make sharing easier with AMP.

• First, all Google URLs (The Google AMP cache URL and Google AMP viewer URL) will reflect the original source material as best as possible.
• Second, when users scroll down the page, the AMP viewer header bar will become hidden to free up more screen space.
• Third, when users visit a Google AMP viewer URL on a platform where the viewer is not available, they will be redirected to the canonical page.
• Lastly, but most important, they have added an “anchor button” (it looks like a chain link) so when clicked, it will display the source URL.

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